Madam – So, Ruth Dudley Edwards feels that Ireland was an "introverted little island" saved from its own cultural mediocrity by an influx of compassionate British colonists.

This is little more than Kipling's "white man's burden" applied to art.

In fact, it was the British who knocked the stuffing out of Irish cultural confidence in the first place. From the Statutes of Kilkenny to the Penal Laws, British policy in Ireland was as much about explicit cultural domination as it was about economic domination.

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